NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR NON-FICTION • WINNER OF THE WRITERS’ TRUST NON-FICTION PRIZE “Absolutely spellbinding.” —The New York Times The environmental true-crime story of a glorious natural wonder, the man who destroyed it, and the fascinating, troubling context in which this act took place. FEATURING A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR On a winter night in 1997, a British Columbia timber scout named Grant Hadwin committed an act of shocking violence in the mythic Queen Charlotte Islands. His victim was legendary: a unique 300-year-old Sitka spruce tree, fifty metres tall and covered with luminous golden needles. In a bizarre environmental protest, Hadwin attacked the tree with a chainsaw. Two days later, it fell, horrifying an entire community. Not only was the golden spruce a scientific marvel and a tourist attraction, it was sacred to the Haida people and beloved by local loggers. Shortly after confessing to the crime, Hadwin disappeared under suspicious circumstances and is missing to this day. As John Vaillant deftly braids together the strands of this thrilling mystery, he brings to life the ancient beauty of the coastal wilderness, the historical collision of Europeans and the Haida, and the harrowing world of logging—the most dangerous land-based job in North America.

Monumental epic poem tells the heroic story of Aeneas, a Trojan who escaped the burning ruins of Troy to found Lavinium, the parent city of Rome, in the west.

Once upon a time, anthropology had something to offer philosophy. It was a time when Continential thinkers drew on anthropology's theoretical terms—mana, taboo, potlatch—in order to reflect on the limits of human belief and imagination. Among these philosophic dialogues with anthropology, we find Ludwig Wittgenstein's Remarks on Sir James Frazer's magnum opus, The Golden Bough. Now, Hau Books brings you the first translation by an anthropology—Stephan Palmié—of this masterpiece. Wittgenstein's remarks on ritual, magic, religion, belief, ceremony, and Frazer's own logical presuppositions are as lucid and thought-provoking now as they were over half-a-century ago. Anthropologists find themselves repeating many of Wittgenstein's same questions and confronting similar doubts today: Is metaphysics a kind of magic? What do we call “ritual”? Are humans simply “ceremonial animals”? This book is not only a fresh translation, but a fresh set of engagements with Wittgenstein's ideas from some of the world's most brilliant anthropologists. Contributors include: David Graeber, Veena Das, Michael Lambek, Heonik Kwon, Carlo Severi, Michael Taussig, Wendy James, Giovanni da Col, and Michael Puett. Here is a unique and well-overdue discussion of the mythologies in our language. Taking interdisciplinarity seriously, this volume returns to the ethnographic imagination that made great thinkers like Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, and indeed Ludwig Wittgenstein take heed—and returns the favor to the philosophical tradition that found wonder and pause for thought in the anthropological canon.

The White Goddess is perhaps the finest of Robert Graves's works on the psychological and mythological sources of poetry. In this tapestry of poetic and religious scholarship, Graves explores the stories behind the earliest of European deities—the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death—who was worshipped under countless titles. He also uncovers the obscure and mysterious power of "pure poetry" and its peculiar and mythic language.

Sir James G. Frazer (1854-1941), the famed author of The Golden Bough, examines the prevalence of flood myths around the world to identify the folkloric origins of the widespread belief that the world was once submerged beneath the waters while only a few humans survived. Writing in the introduction to this remarkable volume, Frazer explains his goal: "My purpose is to discover how the narratives arose, and how they came to be so widespread over the earth; with the question of their truth or falsehood I am not primarily concerned, though of course it cannot be ignored in considering the problem of their origin." Frazer sought no simple answer; indeed, he concluded that flood myths have a range of origins, including both independent developments and diffusion from a common source. Today, Frazer's collection of world flood myths remains one of the most comprehensive ever assembled and a treasury of information for students of comparative mythology. About the Book The Great Flood grew out of Frazer's 1916 Huxley Lecture at the Royal Anthropological Institute and was published as the fourth chapter of Frazer's Folk-lore in the Old Testament (1918). This edition reprints the complete text of The Great Flood along with an abridged selection of the original notes.